Heart of Steel
by AtLoLevad
Summary: Mary, Edith, and Sybil Grantham are the opening act for the White Cliffs of Moher. Too bad Mary hates the lead singer, Matthew Crawley. Everything will change as the two groups embark on a United States tour!
1. Chapter 1

"Opening act?" Mary practically screamed, "We are not an opening act."

Mary's sisters and band mates, Sybil and Edith, leaned back in their chairs as Mary slammed her palms down on Robert's desk.

"You're our father!" She exclaimed, her cheeks flushing red, "You're supposed to make sure we're successful."

Robert Grantham flushed before standing up to his full height, "Mary! I understand that you're upset. But shouting at me is not going to solve anything."

Mary crossed her arms over her chest and scowled, "Fine. Then you're going to say that we aren't an opening act."

Robert crossed his arms and started back at his oldest daughter, "I most certainly am not doing that. Your last album didn't sell as much as we wanted it to. Being an opening act for this group will bring more publicity and possibly a new fan base."

Sybil and Edith shared a look; once their sister and father got into it, a fight could last for a while.

Sybil leaned forward and tapped her fingers on the desk, both Robert and Mary's heads snapped to look at her.

"I think you've left out a key piece of information, Dad," she said, "Who exactly are we opening for?"

Robert ran a hand over his face. Mary was going to go completely mental.

"White Cliffs of Moher," he said finally, bracing himself for the explosion.

Edith and Sybil both went white. Mary's hatred of Matthew Crawley was well documented.

Mary's tone was icy, "Crawley and Branson. We're supposed to open for those two pricks?!"

Sybil winced, "Mare..."

Mary rounded on her sister, "Oh no! I am not compromising on this!"

Edith wrinkled her nose, "Don't you think it's time you -"

Mary practically growled, "No! I'm not opening for them."

She shot one more withering look at her father before storming out of the office and slamming the door behind her.

Robert sunk to his chair, "What on Earth is her problem with Matthew Crawley and Tom Branson? They seem relatively clean cut."

Edith and Sybil looked at each other, debating whether or not to betray Mary's trust.

"Well..." Edith said, "See, do you remember Mary's car accident three years ago?"

Robert nodded; of course he remembered. Mary had been in the hospital for almost a month.

"What does the accident have to do with this?" he asked.

Sybil chewed on her lip.

Edith frowned, "Matthew Crawley was driving the other car. He hit Mary and drove away."

Robert jumped up and thundered, "What?"

Sybil nodded, "Mary told us a few weeks after the accident. But Matthew's obviously never said anything, and Mary thinks he's a rotten coward. And oh, Daddy, you can tell her we told you!"

Robert breathed deep through his nose, attempting to calm himself down.

"Fine," he said, "I won't tell Mary, but you're going to have to go through with opening for them. You girls need the publicity."

Edith sighed, "We'll talk to Mary."

"Good," Robert nodded, "Make sure she's on board. The announcement is in three days."

Edith and Sybil nodded, agreeing to try and convince their sister to join the tour.

* * *

><p>Mary stormed out of her father's London office and burst onto the street.<p>

A gust of wind blew, ruffling her hair and forcing her to pull her plaid wool jacket tighter around her slender body.

She was still angry, even though a small part of her brain told her that there was no way her father could have known about her issues with Matthew Crawley.

Mary marched stiffly back to the apartment she shared with her sisters.

The cold was bothering her arm.

Once she opened the door to the loft apartment, Mary flung her jacket off and tossed it onto the couch.

"I can't believe this," she sighed, kicking off her boots and dropping onto the couch.

Her phone was buzzing away, messages from Edith and Sybil probably, but Mary didn't even look at it when she turned the device off.

Mary tucked her feet up under her butt and rolled up the sleeve on her sweater. The six-inch scar that disappeared onto her shoulder made her want to hit something.

Mary ran her fingers over the jagged line, her thoughts turning to the accident two years ago.

-_It had been late. Mary was driving home from the recording studio. Sybil and Edith had both left hours and hours ago. But Mary, Mary was a perfectionist and she wasn't leaving until she knew that their second album was close to perfect._

_It was either snowing or raining that night - two years out, Mary couldn't remember._

_But what she could remember was the excruciating pain she had felt when that car had hit hers head on._

_She could barely remember the car flipping over itself - once, twice, three times before coming to a stop upside down._

_Mary had cried out, dangling upside down from her seat belt. Her fingers had scrambled for purchase, trying to take pressure off of her shoulders. They had been screaming in pain, and everything was slippery. Later, Mary would realize that this was all blood - her blood._

_Mary's head was pounding, and her eyelids were getting heavy._

_"Oh, shite," a make voice said from outside the car. Or at least, Mary thought it was outside the car, everything sounded fuzzy and far away._

_"Are you alright?" The voice said, and Mary wanted to roll her eyes. Of bloody course she wasn't 'alright,' she was dangling upside down in her buggering car, for Christ's sake._

_"I want to report an accident," the voice said, and Mary blinked her eyes open with difficulty, trying to see who was calling 999._

_A face swam into view, and Mary blinked hard to get her eyes to focus._

_Blond hair, blue eyes. Mary tried to place him._

_Matthew Crawley! She realized, half of that new band with the crap name._

_He had a cut on his forehead, blood streaming down his cheek._

_He had been the one to hit her, Mary thought before everything finally went black and she couldn't feel the pain anymore._

_Mary woke up in the hospital three days later with pins in her arm and uncertainty about her future playing guitar._

_Matthew Crawley never came forward to apologize or take the blame for the accident._

_Her entire career could have been ruined all because of him._

_Mary hated him for it. -_

Mary shook herself from her thoughts as the door to the apartment opened.

"Mare?" Sybil called out, holding the door for Edith.

"I'm not doing it," Mary shouted.

Edith closed the door behind her and draped her jacket on the back of the couch, "Mary, we have to. Maybe it won't be as bad as you think."

Mary narrowed her eyes, "I won't be anywhere near that man. Not after what he did to me."

Sybil sat on the couch and tucked herself close to Mary, "We know. We're not asking you to marry him! Just do the tour and you won't have to deal with him again. Daddy says we need the publicity."

Mary's fingers drifted to her elbow, if she pressed hard enough she could feel the metal pins that were now holding her arm together. Matthew Crawley had done that.

But she looked at Sybil's pleading face and Edith's hopeful one, and Mary could feel her resolve crumbling.

"I won't spend time with him outside of official duties," Mary said, punctuating her sentence with a firm, "Ever!"

Edith grinned, "Oh! You won't have to! We'll have our own tour bus and we don't have to let them on. Promise!"

Mary sighed heavily and fiddled with her rings.

"Okay," she said.

"Okay?" Edith and Sybil repeated.

Mary nodded, "I'll do it. We'd better call Dad."

Edith grinned, "I'll do it!"

She headed off to the kitchen to call Robert and tell him that Mary had agreed.

* * *

><p><strong>AN: Hey there! So this was born of a random thought I had a few weeks ago. Matthew and Tom will make their appearance next chapter, and I hope you guys like this! Let me know your thoughts =D**

**Also, I chose to use Grantham as the girls' las name, since they can't obviously share the same name as Matthew for this story! Hope you guys don't mind =D**


	2. Chapter 2

Three days later the Internet was buzzing with the news of the tour. Apparently the White Cliffs of Moher had a bigger following than Mary thought.

Meanwhile, the fact that they were the opening act was not nearly as talked about. That was driving Robert mad.

"I know you don't like it," he said at dinner, "But you're going to have to do more press with the lads."

His wife, Cora, winced as Mary slammed her knife down, "Mary, dear, please restrain yourself."

Mary shook her head, "I won't do it. I said I would make the announcement, but I won't do anything more than that."

Edith swallowed the food that was in her mouth and said, "Mare, it might be a good idea to drum up more chatter around our involvement."

Mary shot Edith such a withering look that Edith actually visibly recoiled.

"Or not," Edith murmured to herself, looking down at her plate.

Sybil sighed, "I don't know. Matthew and Tom seemed rather nice. So did the other members of the band, not that we had the chance to chat so much."

She shot Mary a furtive look, frustrated at her older sister's behavior.

Mary sighed, "Of course they seem nice. It's all a part of their image."

She said 'image' like most people say 'infectious disease.'

Robert braced himself for his next announcement. He knew Mary wasn't going to like it.

"I've had a chat with Carson," Robert started.

Edith and Sybil raised their eyebrows. Carson was their father's oldest friend, and the girls' publicist. Robert chatting with him could only mean something was in the works.

Mary put her fork down, "And?"

"And," Robert said, "We've decided that you and the lads are going to be having photo opportunities in each city you stop at. I want it to look like you get along swimmingly, Mary."

Mary surprised them all by not immediately screaming. Instead she went completely silent, and Sybil would swear later to Edith that she had seen tears forming in their older sister's eyes.

"Fine," Mary said softly, "It seems that I'm not going to win this argument."

She pushed away from the table, and ran from the room.

"I don't see why she has to be so dramatic about everything," Robert huffed, "It's not like I've asked her to personally clean every bathroom in America."

Cora lifted one shoulder in a shrug, "It's Mary. She'll come around."

Edith looked at Sybil and leaned forward to whisper, "Oh, how wrong they are."

* * *

><p>"Hey, Matty," Tom Branson called from the kitchen of the flat he shared with his best friend, "Meant to ask you the other day, but why does Mary Grantham look at you like you're the scum of the Earth?"<p>

Matthew Crawley dropped his notebook to his lap and ran a hand over his face, noting absently that he had to shave.

"Long bit of history," he said shortly, not wanting to get into the whole accident debacle with Tom.

Tom's eyebrows shot up into his hairline, "History, eh? Did you love her and leave her before the band started up, then?"

Matthew winced, "No, nothing like that. Just…something that I've taken the blame for."

Tom grabbed his beer and tossed his body over the back of the couch, "You've peaked my curiosity, Crawley. Now you've got to tell me."

Leaning forward to place his pen in the crease of his notebook, and looking wistfully at the musical notes he had already jotted down, Matthew shook his head, "I'd rather not talk about it, Tom."

In fact, Matthew tried very hard not to think about that day. He hated what had led up to the accident and he hated the aftermath.

But Tom Branson was nothing if not persistent.

"You may not tell me now, Matty. But we're gonna be on a tour bus for months with the other lads, and Mary and her sisters will be following right behind," Ton grinned and took a slug of his beer, "I'm willing to bet that I get the full story out of ye sooner rather than later."

Matthew leaned back and kicked his feet up onto the coffee table, "Don't bet on it. I'm not likely to start blabbing that story around town."

Tom lifted his almost empty beer bottle in the air, "That's what you say now. But I can't wait for the real story to come out."

Matthew gathered up his notebook and pen, "You won't hear any story, and you'll be happy about it."

He tossed an easy grin over his shoulder, "And stop being so obvious when you ogle Sybil Grantham."

"I was not ogling Sybil Grantham," Tom protested loudly, "She was bloody staring at me."

"Whatever you say," Matthew grinned. This was definitely going to be an interesting tour.

* * *

><p>Mary successfully avoided talking about the blasted tour for the next three weeks. She let Sybil and Edith handle the talks with their father and Carson, listening occasionally when they wanted to talk about it in the flat.<p>

But now it was the night before they were meant to fly out of Heathrow and to Seattle, and Mary couldn't avoid her new reality anymore.

She was packing up her bag with last minute items. The majority of hers Sybil, and Edith's clothes had already been shipped to Seattle, where their tour bus was waiting.

Mary dropped her make-up bag into the open suitcase and sighed. Months on tour with Matthew Crawley, the man who had almost ended her career was going to be a true test of strength.

The constant physical therapy she underwent to make sure her elbow remained healthy was always a reminder of that night. It made it hard for Mary to forget, and even harder for her to forgive.

Sybil burst into Mary's room a moment later, "Are you all packed? This is so exciting!"

She launched herself and bounced onto Mary's bed, dislodging a few stray hair products.

Mary smiled wanly at her baby sister's enthusiasm, but couldn't muster much herself.

"It will definitely be interesting," Mary conceded, dropping a hairbrush into the suitcase.

"Oh, Mary," Sybil sighed, "I can't even imagine how difficult this is for you! But forget about Matthew Crawley and focus on the fact that we'll be traveling all around America!"

Mary allowed herself a small smile, "That is going to be fun. Edith already said she wants to see the Hollywood Walk of Fame when we're in California."

Sybil grinned cheekily, "And Disney World when we're in Florida!"

"And Fifth Avenue!" Mary said, perking up at the thought of all those high-end boutiques.

"And the Empire State Building," Edith's voice chimed in from the door. Mary and Sybil whipped their heads around to look at their middle sister.

"What?" she said, "Aren't we naming things we're excited to see in America?"

Sybil nodded eagerly, "Join us, Edith! I'm helping Mary pack and we're planning all the things to see."

Mary rolled her eyes, "You are not helping be pack. In fact, all you've done is bounce around my hair products."

Sybil dropped a bottle of shine serum into the suitcase, "There, I've helped."

Edith dropped next to Sybil and tossed in a hair straightener, "I've helped too."

Mary huffed a breath, but smiled at her sisters. With them smiling back at her, bright-eyed and excited, the business of touring suddenly didn't seem so terrible.

Maybe with them by her side, she could manage being around Matthew Crawley for an extended period of time.

* * *

><p><strong>AN: Thank you for the amazing response to the first chapter! I'm sorry for the delay, but I've been so crazy lately and my life has been a bit hectic. Just know that I will be finishing this story, so please stick with me!**

**Anyway, here's our first look at Matthew and Tom! Next chapter the tour will actually start, so we'll get moving with the actual plot, as opposed to the set up. I really hope you're all enjoying this! **

**Also, as mentioned in the story, the gang will be touring America, so if any of you have particular landmarks or ****monuments or locations you'd like to see in the story please mention it in a review! =D**


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